Archive for May 7th, 2007

I’m conflicted about this. In a way, it’s something you will want to know, but it’s also something you won’t want to know. It deals with the part of chicken you buy that’s not chicken—usually the figure is given as a percentage that’s water. The problem is, it’s not water, it’s what the chicken processors refer to as “fecal soup.” It’s why other countries will not accept US chicken. Details here.

Now that Bradley Schlozman is in the sights of congressional investigators for his allegedly partisan approach to hiring at the Civil Rights Division, it’s worth taking another look at how he ran the place.

As I reported last month, Schlozman made sure that attorneys underneath him knew that if they crossed him, they’d pay for it. But how? Partially by simply making life miserable for them, but also by providing negative performance evaluations for attorneys who disagreed with him. Performance evaluations are of vital important to civil service employees who may want to eventually work elsewhere in government or seek promotions.

Joe Rich, the former chief of the voting section, says that under Schlozman and Hans von Spakovsky, the two supervisors of the section, he was ordered to make changes to at least seven performance appraisals: “In several instances,” Rich told me, he was ordered to include negative remarks about the work of at least five attorneys who had apparently done nothing more than make recommendations with which Schlozman and von Spakovsky disagreed.

Rich also said that it also went the other way: “I was also ordered to remove any remarks which noted areas where there could be improvement from the performance appraisals of attorneys who were favored by and had become allies of Mr. Schlozman.”

Rich said that it was too strong of a characterization to say that he’d been ordered to “falsify” the evaluations, which would have been a crime. But he was clear that the orders, like so much of what the political appointees in the Justice Department has done, were a major departure from past practice. In his experience (he worked in the division for nearly forty years), Rich said, past political appointees had not inserted themselves into the evaluation process.

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We’ve become fans of kitty food made by Natura after hearing their president on NPR and learning that their products required no recall because they use all domestic (US) foods in their formula and they hold those ingredients to the same standards as used for human foods. (They tried to find standards for pet foods, but there were none, so they just used human standards.)

Because little big Sophie has a sensitive digestive system, finding food for her can be a challenge. So we went shopping this weekend for something new for her, and I decided to give California Natural a try as a canned food. (Natura makes the Evo kibble that Megs likes, and I decided to discontinue ordering the PetGuard after a vendor stiffed me on an order, so I’m looking for local canned foods.)

Megs turned out not to like the venison and brown rice—too much left in the bowl by the next morning. But the salmon and sweet potato was another story. She practically elbowed me out of the way and scarfed down her whole portion (1/3 of a 6-oz can) before I left the kitchen. Sweet potatoes, BTW, are a good ingredient because they don’t have eyes, which is where problems arise with Irish potatoes.

You’ll note that the protein content of the canned food is low, but that’s because the moisture content is so high, which is part of the idea of feeding canned food in addition to kibble. That, and the kitty thinks it’s a great treat.

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Leisureguy’s Guide to Gourmet Shaving – 6th Edition

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